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There are voices who claim that NPS® does not work effectively for B2B companies.
But on the contrary! The Net Promoter Score® is just as valuable for a B2B company as it is for a B2C brand. But how does the assumption come about?
The reason for this could be that the majority of companies that use NPS are aimed at a B2C audiences, also specialist literature and texts on the Net Promoter Score only deal with the B2C scenario and use appropriate wording most of the time.
These always report on how NPS stands in relation to the ability to reach thousands or tens of thousands of clients, which is simply not applicable or relevant to the average B2B company.
This however does not mean that NPS is not an effective tool for B2B companies that are hoping to attract and retain a larger percentage of their existing customer base. In fact, NPS can become the most powerful tool you have at your disposal when it comes to building relationships with your B2B customers and partners.
B2B surveys achieve a higher response rate
Search online for information on the weaknesses of NPS for B2B companies and you will find plenty of content that focuses on the limited audience of the average B2B company.
B2B companies tend to have fewer customers than B2C companies, but there is a downside to this coin. Because of the close relationship between a B2B company and its customers, it's much easier for a B2B company to get a high NPS survey response rate.
The response rate is one of the most important factors in calculating the quality of NPS data. A higher response rate means better customer loyalty, which in turn means a higher level of accuracy and a lower risk of sample and selection bias.
According to Bain & Company, the developers of the NPS, the target NPS response rate for business-to-business brands is 50% above the average value achieved by consumer-oriented brands.
While B2C companies aim for a response rate of up to 40%, B2B companies should be able to achieve a response rate of 60% or more when combining survey channels.
The response rate has a major impact on the statistical validity of a survey. Thanks to the higher response rate from B2B NPS surveys, business-to-business companies can have more confidence in their data. These enable them to make meaningful and effective decisions to improve customer loyalty.
Closing the customer feedback loop is easier
Another benefit of using Net Promoter Score for your B2B company is that you can respond to customer feedback much faster and more decisively.
If you're a B2C company, with hundreds of thousands of customers and tens of thousands of responses to your surveys, sorting feedback and quantifying which parts of your product or service need to be considered is quite a challenge.
If your NPS software does not provide a reliable feedback segmentation function, this can lead to analysis paralysis, whereby no changes, adjustments or improvements are made at all because you do not know which part needs attention first.
This in turn leads to the fact that you lose more customers instead of inspiring critics and retaining them as customers because they do not receive any feedback on the feedback you have given and are of the opinion that there was no interest in it.
In B2B, however, it is possible to make quick changes to your services and processes and provide direct feedback. This will help you turn critics into passives, passives into promoters, and promoters into enthusiastic and motivated partners of your company.
The closer your relationship with your customers, the easier it is to generate feedback and implement meaningful changes. In B2B, close business relationships are a matter of course, so you have many more options to react quickly to feedback and improve your customer satisfaction.
Strong relationships generate more meaningful feedback
Having a B2B customer base not only helps drive a higher response rate, but they are also more likely to produce meaningful, high quality feedback that will help you improve your product or service.
Large B2B companies are all about teamwork, both between team members and between teams and associated customers. This creates a stronger, deeper working relationship where information flows freely from one party to the other to perform your service.
As a result, it's much easier to generate high quality, actionable feedback from B2B customers than it is with B2C. After all, you are not a stranger to them, but a trustworthy partner with a real working relationship.
Customers are more likely to bring useful ideas
In the B2C sector, it is anything but unusual for customers to stick with one brand and ignore other offers. Typically, customers stay loyal to a company that feels familiar, personal, and suits their needs well in terms of price and quality.
A customer who is satisfied with a certain car manufacturer, for example, can stay with him for years, as is the case with an electronics brand or a manufacturer of sports shoes.
In the B2B space, customers are much more likely to experiment with a range of different products and services from different companies. And that's mainly because business-to-business companies have a certain list of mandatory requirements like certifications, security guarantees, and so on.
After all, B2B is all about results, and there is no better way to get better results than to experiment with different vendors.
This means that your customers can be a useful source of not only feedback on your product or service, but also ideas that can help you overcome your competitors.
Once your customers have used a variety of competing products and services, they can often fall back on their experience to tell you where your offering is great, where it is missing, and how best to improve to outperform the competition .
It is easy to miss opportunities for innovation when you are stuck in the "bubble" of running your business on a day-to-day basis.
Use the knowledge of your customers and discover great ideas for new functions, improvements and extensions of your product or service.
Is your B2B company using NPS effectively?
From deeper, actionable feedback to statistical accuracy made possible by a higher response rate, using the Net Promoter Score to survey your B2B customers offers a multitude of benefits.
With Callexa, you can automatically survey your customers with the Net Promoter System to generate meaningful feedback and learn exactly how your company is doing.
Find out more about the Net Promoter Score and start your NPS campaign with our free "Starter" tariff!
Recommended reading: If this article helped you and you would like to learn more about the role of NPS in shaping the customer experience, continue reading here: "The role of NPS in customer experience (CX)"